Abstract
The Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC) is hosting a critical conversation about research cultures and economies in the Arts & Humanities, revolving around “The Labour of Being Studied/The Labour of Refusing to be Studied,” with distinguished speakers Aylan Couchie, d’bi.young anitafrika, Emily Simmonds and Karyn Recollet. This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Network.
DREC is an interdisciplinary research ethics-focused endeavour that seeks to disrupt settler colonial, dispossessory and asymmetrical forms of knowledge and to think through the ways that value and reward are circulated within research cultures and economies. At DREC we are grappling with the ways in which institutional research values normalize, and apologize for, extractive logics and practices that make it okay for researchers to often take more than they give (and to see and hear only what they want to see and hear).
We hope this event will be an afternoon of thinking together about relations between artists and researchers (and artists as researchers), as well as Arts & Humanities research logics, centering the voices of artists and arts-based practitioners to flip the academic order of things, to lead with artist- and/or community-focused priorities.
Some questions we will be considering in this critical conversation include:
- What does it mean to study?
- What does it mean to be studied?
- What are the labours of being studied?
- Upon what terms are these labours invited/expected?
- What does the university expect from you? How do you negotiate those expectations?
- What does accountability look/feel like to you?
- What does reciprocality look/feel like to you?
- What does compensation look/feel like to you?
- What does value look/feel like to you?
- How do you navigate accountability, reciprocality and compensation within or beyond the limitations of the university?
- How do artists, community-organizers and researchers refuse these labours, or refuse the terms upon which these labours are invited or expected?
- What are the labours of refusing study?
- How does a move towards “participatory” and/or “community-engaged” research shift what it means to study, to be studied or to refuse study?
Invited Speakers
Aylan Couchie is an interdisciplinary Anishinaabe artist and writer from Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario. She is a NSCAD University alumna and received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design from OCAD University. Her work explores the impacts of colonialism, issues of cultural appropriation and First Nations representation. She’s been the recipient of several awards including an “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture” award through the International Sculpture Centre and a Premier’s Award through Ontario Colleges. Her work has been shown internationally and some of her current public art installations can be found in the City of Barrie and Halifax International Airport.
d’bi.young anitafrika: From facilitating international artist residencies in South Africa, Hawaii, India, Belize, the UK and Costa Rica to being heralded as a YWCA Woman of Distinction in the Arts, the creative endeavors of African-Jamaican d’bi.young anitafrika are globally celebrated. A triple Dora award-winning published playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and emerging scholar, anitafrika is also the creator of the intersectional, decolonialist praxis, the Anitafrika Method. She is the founding Artistic Director of the Watah Theatre and the Anitafrika Retreat Centre where she teaches artists from around the world. Addressing issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and the human experience through her vast field of artistic knowledge, anitafrika is about to embark upon postgraduate studies in London UK where she will be researching the use of Theatre to address generational trauma in the Black body. Please support her funding campaign at gofundme.com/dbimafund.
Emily Astra-Jean Simmonds is a PhD candidate in the department of Science and Technology Studies at York University. Her activist research practice is primarily energized by questions about consent, colonial infrastructures, toxic sovereignties and the biopolitics of settler colonialism. Currently, her work focuses on how uranium economies and ecologies amplify and produce colonial geographies, and the various ways in which asymmetrical exposures to toxicants and radiological contaminants are rendered permissible. As a Métis feminist scholar she is committed to actions that support just and mutually considered livable futures. She is also a member of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) based in St. John’s NFLD, and the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) in Toronto, ON.
Karyn Recollet is an Assistant professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Karyn is an urban Cree whose research explores the multiple layered relationships that urban Indigenous folx have with lands’ overflow. Karyn’s focal points are choreographic fugitivity, Indigenous futurities, decolonial love / processes of creating radical relationalities with kin.
Event details
Friday 11 May 2018, 3-6pm
Room 727 Bissell Building, 140 St. George Street